Mapping “Londrinas”: imaginary and urban experience

Abstract

Under the abstraction of the city there are infinity distinct cities which are lived in the immediate world (experiential) and mediate (imaginary). In this way each person has its own city, which is a fragment of the objective city, being configured while subjective city in its existential space. But far from being infinity possibilities that has nothing to do with one another, these “invisible cities”, imaginaries, possesses clear links that tie existence and imaginary, individual and collective. One way to access this link is “the search for things themselves” by looking for the previous sense of urban experience, in other words, the way the city appears in lived experience. This method involves a phenomenological posture of field research through meetings and a practice of wandering. It is admitted the subject-object fluidity once being in the subjectivity of the way’s choice and course fundamental elements in the uncoiling of the research and in the revealing of the object. In this sense, through phenomenological archeology undertaken in a qualitative research we searched the lived “Londrinas” through its description in phenomenological sense, just like a cartographer-geographer that searches signs to draw the outlines, colors depth and volume of these imaginary cities. The results are holographic fragments of the city that describe the existence and urban experience Key words: Urban experience. Imaginary of the city. Phenomenological archeology. Field of work